Road safety evaluation: an analytic model proposal for the Road Safety Audit and Review

The analysis of road safety, seen as the procedure which is to be implemented in order to reduce or completely eliminate road accidents should be performed with a high level of efficacy, as for all the other disciplines where man’s safety in general is involved. For this reason several models and analysis were developed in the last years on this matter, as well as the standards and the guidelines issued by the National Government and the European Community. By means of a unique model, this paper links road safety to the geometrical, functional and subsidiary parameters of a road infrastructure. The diagnostic process is based on the general guidelines of the Road Safety Audit and Review, and consists of different macro-stages, all of them enabling the user to get also to the intermediate results. In the first stage, in particular, the geometrical elements which are to be taken into account and the corresponding characteristic parameters are detected. The elaboration of the data collected is performed during the second phase by means of the identification of the route anomalies from the viewpoint of planimetric and altimetric defects, with special interest for the plano-altimetric coordination. The last part of the analysis, through accidents surveying, discovers the critical points (black-spots) of the track, so as to find their correlations with the route defects belonging to the geometrical conditions of the infrastructure. In order to consider the different surroundings, the implementation of the proposed model makes a difference between the urban scenario and the outer environment, all the different resolutory approaches being as a matter of fact considered. Apart from the user friendliness, the Authors highlight the fact that this model is an efficient tool for the planning interventions of the road infrastructures safety, thanks to its analytical validation.